Duration

Course Features

Lectures22

Duration
02:02:48

Skill Level
Beginner

Students
0

Language
English

CertificateYes

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Description

Explore the practical sides of REST to build data-centric applications with Node

RESTful Web APIs allow developers to create unprecedented applications by leveraging the data on the Internet. Since JavaScript is the language of the web, building APIs using Node.js provides a seamless development experience on both the front end and the back end.

This video course gives you an overview of a RESTful API and goes through the logical steps of building one. It explores three different APIs, focusing on their similarities and differences to effectively implement one.

We’ll start off by defining APIs, showing how they can be built on top of HTTP, and listing the properties that make an API RESTful. We will develop Twitter Notes, a web application that lets its users leave notes for their Twitter friends. We will use Twitter’s API to implement a login flow and then design a web API. In addition to using Twitter’s API, we will take a closer look at two other real-world APIs—Facebook API and GitHub API. Finally, we’ll end up honing some best practices to keep the APIs secure, maintainable, and performant.

By the end of this course, you will have a good grasp of APIs, HTTP, REST, OAuth 1.0a, API testing, and API security. Since the course explores three different REST APIs, you will reach a level where you will be comfortable using any RESTful API, even if it does not have an SDK.

About The Author

Saleh Hamadeh started programming when he was 13, and he currently studies computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Saleh became president of gt-webdev, a student organization focused on teaching students web development. During his time at Georgia Tech, Saleh interned as a web developer at BrainJocks and Yahoo! Saleh is passionate about the future of the web and hopes to work, learn, and teach in that field.

Basic knowledge

Knowledge of REST or HTTP is not essential as this course provides all the background information required to get you started

What will you learn

Define what an API is and how it is used in client-server communication

Explore HTTP requests and responses and find out about the various fields that make up these requests and responses

Understand the architectural constraints and properties that make an API RESTful

Use Twitter’s API to tweet and search for tweets

Store Twitter’s data in our database to minimize the use of Twitter’s API

Use Async.js to handle Twitter’s API constraints

Test APIs using Postman and Apache Benchmark

Build the API on the server using Express.js and MongoDB

Find out about the Facebook Graph API, and its structure, resources, and permissions

Be introduced to GitHub API, its use of different representations, the PATCH verb, HATEOAS, and conditional requests

We want to create the OAuth authentication flow in our application. This video shows how to generate a request token, send users to Twitter to sign in, and get authenticated users back to our application.

Hitting Twitter’s API every time the app needs Twitter data is slow and can result in Twitter blocking our application. In this video, we will learn how to store Twitter’s data in our database to minimize the use of Twitter’s API.

Changing an API can break an application. For this reason, every API should have acceptance tests, which help prevent breaking apps. In this video, we will use Postman to write acceptance tests for our API.

An API that serves one request per second cannot have the same infrastructure as one that serves thousands of requests per second. In this video, we will learn how to measure the capacity of our API and how to increase that capacity by utilizing multiple CPU cores.

A single API structure cannot fit all applications. We will look at how Facebook structured its API as a social graph. By the end of this video, you will understand what the Facebook Graph API is and how to use it.

In this course, we’ve taken a pedagogical approach to explaining how APIs and authentication is done. In this video, we will look at the security issues with our API and what needs to be done to handle them.

Explain the importance of using HTTPS everywhere

We describe session hijacking, our API’s vulnerability, and the solution

APIs are designed to be used by other people. These users need an easy way to know the capabilities of an API without reading source code. In this video, we will take a look at the tools for generating API documentation.

Software requirements always change, and these changes should not break the apps or destroy the businesses of those using our APIs. API versioning helps us keep old clients compatible while providing new clients with all the new features.

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